Interaction & Satisfaction: Great data no one bothered to check

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Interaction & Satisfaction: Great data no one bothered to check Tom Doubting [email protected] October 2020 Intellectual laziness and a lack of skepticism are actively impeding progress in theoretical linguistics. We have become all too willing to accept novel data from relatively inaccessible languages—and to engage with their often monumental theoretical implications—without even attempting to verify or replicate those data. The purpose of this note is to illustrate just one egregious case of this problem, which lends itself to a particularly concise and focused presentation. Before doing that, we must immediately express that we are not fieldwork nihilists: we believe fieldwork plays an indispensable role in the generative enterprise. Data from one language alone will never suffice to give a single explanatorily adequate theory of natural language. We as theoretical linguists simply cannot afford to ignore comparative evidence, and the wider and more diverse the pool of languages we draw evidence from, the better and more robust our theoretical arguments are. At the same time, we also cannot afford to automatically take all kinds of comparative data as given, without subjecting them to the same careful scrutiny as we already apply to data from more familiar sources. This might sound like an uninteresting truism: only solid evidence can meaningfully bear on an argument. While common sense endorses this truism, the practice of our field completely ignores it. In fact, we happen to formulate or falsify theories on the basis of data that are documented by very few researchers—often by one researcher alone. Analytical mistakes happen on a regular basis in all scientific activities, for all sorts of reasons. If we do not, as a community, deal with such critical data seriously, what prevents analytical mistakes from polluting the body of knowledge we have on the languages of the world? The answer: nothing. Nothing prevents this, especially given that replication of such data is made difficult by the inherent costs (in time and money) associated with properly conducting Glossing abbreviations are as follows: 1 first person; 2 second person; 3 third person; acc accusative; addr addressee; C complementizer; cl clitic; erg ergative; ind.obj indirect object; obj object; part participant; pl plural; sg singular; spkr speaker; subj subject; tam tenseaspect-modality marker. We have not attempted to impose uniformity across the transcription systems used by our various sources. The minor differences among them (P/’, a;/aa, x /g) do not affect any of the points we are making.

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fieldwork research. What is even more troubling is that such pollution is all too often made irreversible by the sad fact that many languages are on their way to extinction—an imminent threat to experimental replicability. Furthermore, if our eagerness for new revolutionary data overcomes our intellectual duty of comparing novel descriptions with existing ones, we cease to be an empirical science: what we produce and go after is sensation. The case documented below checks all the boxes. The novel data that support the theoretical proposal advanced in Deal (2015b) are the result of what is most likely an analytical mistake, if anything because (as we shall see) all existing descriptions of the language (Nez Perce) converge in critically contradicting them. Since similar data have not been replicated in any other language or by any other linguist since, the claims in Deal (2015b) should have been taken with a grain of salt all along. Instead, this very influential paper1 has had the effect that these flawed data are now considered part of the explananda of agreement in natural language. What makes this case particularly apt to being used as an example here is that there exists an abundance of easily available descriptions (including previous work by Deal herself) that contradict the alleged findings of Deal (2015b)—we will see this in detail. And yet, nobody has cared to check in all these years: had anyone done it, the present note would not exist.

The case of Deal (2015b) The significance of Deal’s claims may best be appreciated against the background of the agreement theories which immediately preceded hers, such as Béjar and Rezac’s (2009) or Preminger’s (2014). Such theories were all built around the fact that probes sometimes seem to find a DP on their search path and yet fail to terminate their search, instead going on to find another DP and to copy some feature from it. Most theories captured this by assuming a φ-feature geometry, e.g. (1), and by specifying some probes to search for a particular node in that geometry. A probe that were to specifically search for participant, for example, would therefore be able to find on its path a nonparticipant DP without stopping its search there (2). (1)

φ π

#

participant

plural

speaker

addressee

1 As of now, the paper has been downloaded 2,151 times from LingBuzz and has been cited 67 times according to Google Scholar.

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(2) Agr [upart]

... DP1 (3pl) φ π

# pl

... DP2 (1sg) φ π

...

#

part spkr Different theories implemented this insight in different ways—especially regarding what happens between the probe and DP1 in configurations like (2).2 However, what all these theories had in common was the idea that, in plain φagreement, a probe that is specified to search for a particular node in the feature geometry should not copy nodes from unrelated branches of that geometry—i.e. nodes that neither entail nor are entailed by the particular node the probe was searching for.3 Sticking to our previous example, a probe being specified to search for participant might, depending on the configuration and on the theory adopted, copy nodes like speaker (which entails participant) or π (which is entailed by participant), but never an unrelated node like plural. Here is where Deal’s alleged findings from Nez Perce become relevant. Focusing on the inflection of the complementizer ke,4 Deal reports examples like (3), where the affixal morphology on the complementizer displays agreement with both subject and object in both person and number.5 2 For example, the probe does not copy any features from DP in Preminger’s (2014) system, 1 but does copy π from it in Béjar and Rezac’s (2009) system. 3 It is worth emphasizing that this generalization only holds of plain φ-agreement, but not of Agree-triggered clitic doubling. The latter, “like any other type of pronominalization, [. . .] copies φ-feature sets in their entirety” (Preminger 2014, p. 31), a property Preminger himself refers to as featural coarseness. With precisely this option in mind, Deal (2015b) provides some arguments against a clitic doubling analysis of her key data—though cf. fn. 10 below. 4 Deal (2015b, pp. 3–4) also mentions a few other particles, implying that they pattern like ke in the relevant respects. Judging from previous sources (Morvillo 1891, p. 63; Aoki 1970, pp. 129–130; Aoki 1994, pp. 257, 472, 858, 991–993; Crook 1999, pp. 213–223), none of those particles actually instantiate the pattern that Deal (2015b) reports for ke. However, since all of her examples only involve ke, we shall also focus on ke and leave the other particles aside. 5 All of the “1pl” glosses here and throughout the rest of the paper should be read as ‘1pl exclusive’.

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(3)

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a.

1 over 2 → agreement with both 1 and 2 ke-m-ex kaa prosubj cewcew-téetu proobj C-2-1 then 1sg telephone-tam 2sg ‘when I call you (sg)’ [13] in Deal (2015b, p. 6)

b.

pl over 2 → agreement with both pl and 2 ke-pe-m kaa A.-nim kaa T.-nm hi-cewcew-tée’nix proobj C-pl-2 then A.-erg and T.-erg 3subj-telephone-tam 2sg ‘when A. and T. call you (sg)’ [20] in Deal (2015b, p. 8)

c.

1pl over 2 → agreement with 1, pl, and 2 ke-pe-m-ex kaa prosubj cewcew-tée’nix proobj C-pl-2-1 then 1pl telephone-tam 2sg ‘when we call you (sg)’ [21] in Deal (2015b, p. 8)

Notice that all the examples in (3) have a 2sg DP as their object. But crucially, if we switch around the features of subject and object, the agreement pattern becomes quite different. If the 2sg DP is the subject, the complementizer will then only show agreement with it, not with any of the features of the object. (4)

a.

2 over 1 → agreement only with 2 ke-m kaa prosubj cewcew-téetum proobj C-2 then 2sg telephone-tam 1sg ‘when you (sg) call me’

[12] in Deal (2015b, p. 6)

b.

2 over 1pl → agreement only with 2 ke-m kaa prosubj ’ee nees-cewcew-téetum proobj C-2 then 2sg 2sg.cl obj.pl-telephone-tam 1pl ‘when you (sg) call us’ [23] in Deal (2015b, p. 8)

c.

2 over pl → agreement only with 2 ke-m kaa prosubj ’ee ’e-nees-cewcew-téetu proobj C-2 then 2sg 2sg.cl 3obj-obj.pl-telephone-tam 3pl ‘when you (sg) call them’ [22] in Deal (2015b, p. 8)

Contrasts such as those between (3) and (4) suggest that the search by the complementizer probe(s) is specifically halted by 2nd-person features—i.e. in terms of theories like Béjar and Rezac’s (2009) or Preminger’s (2014), that the relevant probe(s) must be specified to search for the addressee node in the feature geometry. For such theories, however, this specification should also prevent the relevant probe(s) from copying any unrelated features like speaker or plural—a prediction which appears to be wrong: as Deal (2015b) observes, the complementizer does participate in speaker and plural agreement in her examples in (3). Deal (2015b) thus takes this as evidence for a new theory of agreement, which distinguishes two sets of featural specifications for each probe: 4

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• a probe P’s interaction-feature set contains each feature f such that P must copy f whenever P finds f on its search path; • a probe P’s satisfaction-feature set contains each feature g such that P’s copying g results in terminating P’s search. On this account, the Nez Perce complementizer probe would have all nodes of the φ-feature geometry as its interaction features, but only addressee as its satisfaction feature. “The features that C interacts with need not entail those that satisfy it [. . .]. C simply interacts with all φ features it encounters until probing stops (due to satisfaction [by an addressee], or exhaustion of possible goals)” (Deal 2015b, p. 8). The theoretical proposal would indeed be compelling—if only the data motivating it were reliable. However, the truth of the matter is that two out of Deal’s three key examples of non satisfying interaction in (3) are either not confirmed or flatly contradicted by all available independent descriptions of Nez Perce morphosyntax (as summarized in Table 2 on page 8). Proceeding in reverse chronological order, we may begin with Crook’s (1999) UCLA dissertation on The phonology and morphology of Nez Perce stress. In paradigm (516) on p. 219 (repeated on p. 222), Crook reports that the form for ‘when I/we (subject)/you (singular) object’ is kemex=kaa (kaa being an irrelevant enclitic conjunction), not Deal’s kepemex (=kaa) as in (3c). (5)

a. Deal’s (2015b) 1pl>2sg: ke-pe-m-ex C-pl-2-1

b. Previously reported 1pl>2sg: ke-m-ex C-2-1

Unfortunately, Crook (1999, p. 219) does not also unambiguously indicate the form for ‘when they (subject)/you sg (object)’. However, the immediately previous source, i.e. Aoki’s (1994, p. 422) Nez Perce dictionary, does provide that form, once again contradicting Deal (2015b): the relevant form is reported to be kem, instead of Deal’s kepem as in (3b). (6)

a. Deal’s (2015b) 3pl>2sg: ke-pe-m C-pl-2

b. Previously reported 3pl>2sg: ke-m C-2

Furthermore, Aoki (1994, p. 422) also aligns with Crook (1999) about the form for 1pl over 2sg being kemex rather than kepemex. He exemplifies kem and kemex as in (7). (7)

From Aoki (1994, p. 422) — interlinear glosses ours a. kí; hí;wes miyáPc ke-m konkí hi;cí;qa Pimené this is child C-2 about.that subj.pl.told 3pl 3pl/2sg: “This is the child they told you (sg) about’ b. kí; hí;wes miyáPc ke-m-ex konkí hicí;qa this is child C-2-1 about.that subj.pl.told 1pl/2sg: ‘This is the child we told you (sg) about’ 5

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Aoki’s (1970) earlier reference grammar reports the same forms on p. 130, listing -m instead of Deal’s -pem as the affix for “3p-2s”, and -mek (the underlying representation of -mex ) instead of -pemek /-pemex as the affix for “1p-2s” (8).6 (8)

From Aoki (1970, p. 131) — interlinear gloss ours ke-m-ex ka; pePníye tí;Pmes C-2-1 then prosubj .1pl subj.pl.gave proind.obj .2sg book 1pl/2sg: ‘when we gave you (sg.) the book’

Finally, even one of the earliest available Nez Perce descriptions, i.e. the Grammatica Linguæ Numipu by Morvillo (1891), strikingly converges in reporting kem and kemex (transcribed as kémeg based on an outdated orthography) as the relevant forms, as shown in Fig. 1. This suggests that this aspect of the paradigm must have remained stable for over a century.

Figure 1: From the paradigm of “Complex relative forms” (Morvillo 1891, p. 51) Of course, having established that all independent Nez Perce sources (Morvillo 1891; Aoki 1970, 1994; Crook 1999, abbreviated as “MAAC”) converge on a different description (henceforth, data set a 7 ) of the relevant paradigm does not necessarily mean that data set a is the only accurate one. Couldn’t we just be dealing with two different Nez Perce dialects, both worthy of theoretical attention? The fact that MAAC are not cited in Deal (2015b) could in principle be due to the author’s not knowing about them. This position, however, becomes increasingly difficult to defend once other works by Deal are examined where the complementizer agreement paradigm is referenced. 6 In between Aoki (1970) and Aoki (1994) is Rude’s (1985) dissertation, which unfortunately does not contain either a full complementizer agreement paradigm or any relevant example sentences. 7 There is a very small caveat to saying that MAAC converge on data set a . As pointed out on page 5, Crook’s (1999) description is not fully explicit on one form—allowing for an ambiguity that is only cleared out by comparing it with previous sources. This caveat does not affect our main point.

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The first place to look at is Deal’s dissertation Topics in the Nez Perce verb, which, unlike Deal (2015b), does cite MAAC. The relevant paradigm is reported there as in Table 1 below (Deal 2010, p. 44). Let’s refer to this paradigm as data set b . Now, data set b strikingly turns out to not conflict with data set a . In particular, the form for 1pl over 2sg is simply absent from the paradigm’s table (as is the whole column pertaining to 1pl-subject forms), while the form for 3pl over 2sg is reported to be kem rather than kepem, thereby crucially diverging from Deal’s (2015b) later report, which we might call data set c (the one supporting Interaction & Satisfaction theory).8 As a matter of fact, the possibility that ke-pe-m be rendered as in Deal (2015b), i.e. with the exponent -pe- resulting from interaction with the plural feature of the 3pl argument, is explicitly excluded in Deal’s dissertation: “It is also worth noting that only 1st and 2nd person arguments agree overtly with the complementizer” (Deal 2010, p. 43). Five years later, the same author forgot about this fact “worth noting”.

no Obj 1sg Obj 1+2 Obj 2sg Obj 2pl Obj 3 Obj

1sg Subj

1+2 Subj

2sg Subj

2pl Subj

3 Subj

kex – ?? kemex kepemex kex

kenm ?? – ?? ?? kenm

kem kemex ?? – – kem

kepem kepemex ?? – – kepem

ke kex kenm kem kepem ke

Table 1: Inflection of complementizer ke in Deal (2010, p. 44) Is data set c —i.e. Deal’s (2015b) empirical support for Interaction & Satisfaction—attested anywhere else? Yes, namely in a descriptive paper of the same year (Deal 2015a). The two 2015 papers make for an interesting comparison because while they converge on the novel data set c , only Deal (2015a), the descriptive paper which makes no theoretical claim based on the crucial complementizer agreement paradigm, has MAAC among its references. However, neither Deal (2015a) nor Deal (2015b) make any mention of the fact that their data are in contrast with what is reported elsewhere—both in Deal (2010) and in MAAC. All these facts are summarized in Table 2, where the two highlighted cells contain the crucial empirical support of the theory of Interaction & Satisfaction according to Deal (2015b). At this point we have the same author offering two distinct and incompatible data sets, b and c , at five years distance from each other. It is important not overlook to the following fact: since both data set b and c differ from MAAC9 (and no other source is indicated in the local context of their presentation), one must presume that both are the result of original elicitation conducted by the author. If we exclude the possibility of homonymy, the two consultants 8 The

cells reported as “??” in Table 1 are given exactly as in Deal (2010, p. 44). data set b —the paradigm in Table 1—been copied from MAAC, the column pertaining to 1pl-subject forms would presumably have been included. 9 Had

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MAAC a

data set MAA 1pl 3pl 1pl 3pl

> > > >

2sg 2sg 2pl 2pl

-pe-m-(e)x

Deal 2015a,b c

[unreported]

ke-pe-m-ex ke-pe-m ke-pe-m-ex ke-pe-m

Crook

ke-m-ex ke-m

Deal 2010 b

[unreported]

ke-m

ke-pe-m-ex ke-pe-m [unreported]

[unreported]

pl/_2 2 1

pl/_2 2 1

cites MAAC? mentions differences w/ other sources? mentions Interaction & Satisfaction?

ke-pe-m

yes no no

pl 2 1 2015a

2015b

yes no no

no no yes

Table 2: A partial synopsis of the three distinct data sets. acknowledged in Deal (2015a,b) form a subset of the four acknowledged in Deal (2010), which makes it basically impossible to attribute the incompatibility of data sets b and c to existing dialectal, inter-generational or even idiolectal variation with respect to this paradigm. None of these discrepancies, in any case, are acknowledged in any of the three works by Deal, as indicated in Table 2. This state of affairs has got to reveal the existence of some weak link(s) in the methodological chain of fieldwork research, and that such inconsistent (or inconsistently reported) data could be taken by the field at large to be solid enough evidence for a whole new theory of agreement is the very core of the problem we hope to have effectively pointed out. There is another compelling reason to discard the “distinct dialects hypothesis” from the set of plausible explanations of the difference between data sets b and c . Once we look at the substance of the disagreement and we consider how these data have been collected, it is easy to recognize that an analytical mistake most likely generated data set c . The key fact is that according to all previous sources, the forms that Deal (2015b) reports for 3pl over 2sg and for 1pl over 2sg—kepem and kepemex, respectively—are unacceptable in such contexts but acceptable in the presence of a 2nd-person plural object: kepem is the attested Nez Perce form for 3(pl/sg) over 2pl, and kepemex the attested Nez Perce form for 1(pl/sg) over 2pl. This means that the English strings that Deal (2015b) provides as translations for (3b) and (3c)—repeated here as (9a) and (9b), and given as [20] and [21] respectively in Deal (2015b, p. 8)—are actually correct if you is interpreted as a 2pl rather than as Deal’s 2sg.

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a. ke-pe-m kaa A.-nim kaa T.-nm hi-cewcew-tée’nix proobj C-pl-2 then A.-erg and T.-erg 3subj-telephone-tam 2pl ‘when A. and T. call you (pl)’ b. ke-pe-m-ex kaa prosubj cewcew-tée’nix proobj C-pl-2-1 then 1pl telephone-tam 2pl ‘when we call you (pl)’

The fact that the 2nd person is systematically syncretic between sg and pl in English—which was presumably the common language used in the elicitation process—is therefore an extremely plausible source for the analytical mistake at the root of Deal’s (2015b) alleged discovery. This mistake must have led Deal to gloss -pe- simply as “pl”, while in fact, in the complementizer agreement paradigm, -pe- only ever appears as part of -pem- to specifically realize agreement with a 2nd-person plural DP. Anywhere else, i.e. whenever the potential DP source is not 2nd person, plural agreement is invariably null, regardless of whether it is subject or object agreement and of whatever interveners stand in the way. The empirical support for Deal’s alleged number asymmetry—whereby pl over 2sg results in plural agreement, while 2sg over pl does not—thus vanishes away: there is no reason to expect to find any overt plural agreement either way. At this point, there is only one of Deal’s (2015b) asymmetries that is confirmed by previous descriptions and thus really remains to be accounted for. That is the asymmetry between 1st and 2nd person: if the subject is 1st person and the object is 2nd person, the complementizer overtly agrees in person with both, while in the reverse configuration the complementizer only overtly agrees in person with the 2nd-person subject (see (10)–(11)). (10)

(11)

From Aoki (1994, p. 422) — interlinear glosses ours a.

1 over 2 → agreement with both 1 and 2 kí; hí;wes miyáPc ke-m-ex konkí hicí;qa this is child C-2-1 about.that subj.pl.told ‘This is the child we told you (sg) about’

b.

2 over 1 → agreement only with 2 kí; hí;wes miyáPc ke-m konkí ná;scamqa nú;ne this is child C-2 about.that subj.sg.told 1pl.acc ‘This is the child you (sg) told us about’

From Aoki (1994, pp. 422–3) — interlinear glosses ours a.

1 over 2pl → agreement with both 1 and 2pl kí; hí;wes miyáPc ke-pe-m-ex konkí hicí;qa this is child C-pl-2-1 about.that subj.pl.told ‘This is the child we told you (pl) about’

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b.

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2pl over 1 → agreement only with 2pl kí; hí;wes miyáPc ke-pe-m konkí ná;cinmqa nú;ne this is child C-pl-2 about.that subj.pl.told 1pl.acc ‘This is the child you (pl) told us about’

Notice, however, that unlike in Deal’s (2015b) empirical landscape, this is no longer an asymmetry consistently replicated across different features (for Deal, both speaker and plural) or different potential exponent combinations (for Deal, -x, -pe-, and -pe. . . -ex ), but is rather an isolated quirk restricted to the first person and its unique exponent -(e)x. Rather than revolutionizing our general theory of agreement to capture this fact, it seems more reasonable to treat it as a mere morphological idiosyncrasy, in any of a number of more or less ad hoc ways. While it is not the purpose of this note to argue for or commit to any one such analytical option, we may simply assume, just as a proof of concept, that there are always two distinct probes in the Nez Perce complementizer field— a subject agreement and an object agreement probe—and we may posit the single impoverishment rule in (12) to delete a 1st-person feature from the object agreement probe in the context of a 2nd-person subject agreement probe.10 (12)

Impoverishment 1→ ∅ / [C0 [AgrS 2] [AgrO

] ... ]

A convincing case for an enrichment of agreement theory along the lines of Deal’s (2015b) Interaction & Satisfaction is therefore yet to be made. Whatever theoretical innovation in the analysis of φ-agreement will turn out to be warranted, it will have to be warranted by solid and reliable data, which is not the case with Deal (2015b).

Conclusion It is somewhat tempting to reduce the case we just saw to an instance of mistaken analysis of linguistic data collected through fieldwork. However, this is only part of the story. Because there is no way to effectively prohibit people from making mistakes, we must resist this temptation and realize that the real problem revealed here is that nobody took the time to check the data reported in Deal (2015b): every single linguist has been to some degree guilty of negligence. Nez Perce morphology, including its complementizer agreement system, has been well-documented by independent fieldworkers for over a century—something that cannot be said of many of the world’s languages. All of this documentation 10 Alternatively, one may analyze the Nez Perce complementizer as a probe that searches for addressee but triggers clitic doubling of all the participants it interacts with (cf. fn. 3). Deal’s (2015b, p. 9) strongest argument against a clitic doubling analysis is that a form like her 1pl-over-2sg ke-pe-m-ex cannot contain a 1pl clitic, given that the pl exponent -pe- and the 1st-person exponent -ex “do not behave as an atomic unit in morphological terms”, separated as they are by the intervening exponent -m. However, this argument disappears once we recognize that, pace Deal (2015a,b), kepemex cannot in fact be used in the relevant configurations, as we argued at length above.

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was easily available to us online, and finding the first discrepancy, by comparing the paradigms in Deal (2015b) and Morvillo (1891), took us exactly 21 minutes. This is to say that this was a very lucky case. The fact that the community of linguists working on agreement (and not only they) have taken data set c for granted for five years, without anyone caring to see whether these data found any confirmation in prior work, is worrying to say the least. How should we feel about forms of linguistic fieldwork in which the facts that are investigated are less amenable to being documented in descriptive works such as grammars? This is the case, to cite just a couple of examples, for fieldwork investigating truth-conditional semantics/pragmatics or syntactic phenomena that are not typically covered in less theory-laden descriptions of a language. We should be quite concerned indeed. If the community of morphosyntacticians blundered on data set c even with such rich documentation converging against it, one is left to wonder how a mistake could ever be caught when such documentation does not even exist. For languages that happen to be spoken natively by many linguists, we have the benefit of colleagues and reviewers who can double-check our data relatively easily. In contrast, for languages like Nez Perce, replication is difficult even when possible. Without replicating fieldwork data, or even checking it, we as a field should not give it too much theoretical weight—certainly not so much as to build a theory on. Should we therefore avoid relying on data from understudied languages altogether? Most certainly not. As pointed out above, we need crosslinguistic data. The inescapable way forward for a discipline that takes itself seriously is a more rigorous approach to evidence. That is, we should be healthily skeptical of novel ground-breaking data—and the more novel and ground-breaking the data, the more skeptical we should be. How should this skepticism translate into action? First, if relevant literature exists, we should double-check the novel data against it—a task that often takes as little as an hour, thanks to increasing online availability of sources. In an ideal world, it would be the fieldworkers themselves who should take care of this consistency check on the literature, rather than boastfully opening their paper with “All data are from the author’s original fieldwork”, but as we saw, we do not live in that world yet. Second, if there is no literature (or none easily accessible), it would be very helpful to have some raw data made available by the fieldworker, so that the double-check performed by the entire community can go beyond a mere consistency check internal to the fieldworker’s own report. Finally, if one is fortunate enough to have direct access to the language in question—e.g. because one happens to do fieldwork on the same language—one should not feel afraid to try and replicate the novel ground-breaking data and to share the result of the attempt. Had all this been the norm in the field, we would have avoided five years of misguided research into Interaction & Satisfaction—and surely many other ill-supported theoretical proposals. While the individual can make a mistake, the community cannot. It is our collective responsibility to protect the body of knowledge the field has accumulated over the decades from the temptation of going after sensation at all costs. 11

Tom Doubting

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References Aoki, Haruo (1970). Nez Perce Grammar. Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press. url: https : / / archive . org / details / nezpercegrammar0006aoki/. Aoki, Haruo (1994). Nez Perce dictionary. Berkeley: University of California Press. url: https://books.google.com/books?id=Z3X0q28uB7cC. Béjar, Susana and Milan Rezac (2009). “Cyclic Agree”. In: Linguistic Inquiry 40.1, pp. 35–73. Crook, Harold David (1999). “The phonology and morphology of Nez Perce stress”. PhD thesis. Los Angeles: UCLA. url: http://linguistics.ucla. edu/images/stories/crook.1999.pdf. Deal, Amy Rose (2010). “Topics in the Nez Perce verb”. PhD thesis. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts. Deal, Amy Rose (2015a). “A note on Nez Perce verb agreement, with sample paradigms”. In: Papers for the International Conference on Salish and Neighbouring Languages 50. Ed. by Natalie Weber et al. University of British Columbia Working Papers in Linguistics 40, pp. 389–413. url: https:// lingpapers.sites.olt.ubc.ca/files/2018/01/ICSNL2015-fullonline. pdf#page=400. Deal, Amy Rose (2015b). “Interaction and Satisfaction in φ-agreement”. In: Proceedings of NELS 45, pp. 179–192. url: https : / / ling . auf . net / lingbuzz/002610. Morvillo, Anthony (1891). Grammatica Linguæ Numipu (A Numipu or Nez-Perce grammar). Reprinted. Originally attributed to Presbyterus Missionarius e Societate Jesu in Montibus Saxosis. Desmet, Idaho: Indian Boys’ Press. url: https://archive.org/details/cihm_17529/. Preminger, Omer (2014). Agreement and its failures. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Rude, Noel Emerson (1985). “Studies in Nez Perce grammar and discourse”. PhD thesis. Eugene: University of Oregon.

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